“You must try to live for your boy,” somebody had written. Darling Eric, thought Lily mechanically. She always thought of Eric as darling, and her voice, saying the word, was almost audible to her. People didn’t understand in the least. How on earth am I to live for Eric, thought Lily, when he’s away at school eight months of the year? He was so young, too, when Richard was killed. We could never share this together.

She tried, all the same, to remember fresh scenes of Eric’s childhood and boyhood. She saw him running about the garden on a day like this, five years old, in his red jersey and little spectacles. Poor Eric. Poor darling. He was always so plain. He didn’t in the least remind one of Richard. Perhaps he was a little like dearest Papa. Lily smiled tenderly to herself and glanced out of the window. But the cockade of Kent’s shining black top-hat still moved round and round the sundial. They would all be late. And then she had another memory of Eric, in his preparatory school Norfolk suit, with his new bicycle and another pair of spectacles, really hideous ones, made so as not to mark the bridge of his nose.

Of course darling Eric would be the greatest joy to her always and the greatest comfort. And every year he would be older and more able to be a companion to her. But the word “companion” stabbed through her again. A person who held your knitting. That’s not life, Lily cried out to herself. That’s not life; people being kind to you and talking in gentle voices, trying to think of things which will amuse you. That’s not life. She got up, and, walking towards the other window, looked out across the valley at the hills towards Yorkshire and the chimney of the bleaching works by the river and the eye-sore, the new sanatorium for consumptive children from the Manchester slums. “That eye-sore,” she called it fiercely, to her father-in-law, who, as usual, grunted. But my life is over, Lily thought.

Perhaps from this very room the Vernon girl of the story had seen her lover drown. Two tiny figures in the valley below. She must have had a telescope. No, it was absurd. The tall stalk-like chimney trailed a long wavy smudge of smoke across the sky. Turning away from that view, so terribly nostalgic, Lily faced her bedroom, the remains of her life; the silver-framed photograph of Richard, taken just before he sailed for France, the hairbrushes she had had as a wedding-present, the black silk cloak—part of her uniform as a widow, laid out across the foot of her single bed.